It’s a great launching off point when you’re talking about families to then talk about, well, some families have different religions, some families eat different food, things like that.
~ Zeba from Episode 111 of The Kindergarten Cafe Podcast
Episode Summary
Teaching about families in kindergarten is about so much more than who lives at home. It’s an opportunity to build empathy, celebrate diversity, and create an inclusive classroom community.
In this episode, I’m sharing how I approach a social studies unit on families with care, intention, and developmentally appropriate strategies that honor all types of family structures.
Whether you’re teaching this unit in November, December, or any time of year, this approach will help your students feel seen, respected, and connected while learning about the diversity that makes each classroom beautiful.
In this episode I share:
- Why I start with students’ real-life experiences as a gateway to empathy and understanding
- My favorite picture books about families that reflect both windows and mirrors
- How to adapt lessons to be mindful of diverse home situations (e.g., two homes, loss, homelessness)
- The email I send families before we begin this unit to foster partnership and awareness
- Activity ideas that combine literacy, math, and SEL from graphing family sizes to sharing traditions
- How I use inclusive language like “who lives with me” instead of “who lives in your house”
- Ways to transition into discussions on culture, food, religion, and traditions
Resources:
Connect with Zeba:
- Instagram – @kindergartencafe
- Facebook – @kindergartencafe
- Website – www.kindergartencafe.org
- Tik Tok – @kindergartencafe
Read the Transcript
[0:00] Hey teacher friends, it’s Zeba from Kindergarten Cafe and today I want to talk about teaching a social studies unit about families. I want to talk about how I teach about families and some resources that you can use when you are teaching about families. So I used to teach about families earlier on in the year, like around the second month of school, and then our curriculum scope and sequence changed as a district. So now we do it later, more like December. But I actually do like doing it in December because we are talking a lot about holidays and traditions, November, December, really. But we’re talking a lot about holidays and traditions and celebrations around this time naturally. And it’s a good segue to talking about families. It’s our first community, Right. The next episode, we’ll be talking more big picture on social studies lessons. But today, I just wanted to focus about one particular unit because you might want to do it right now. Be a good time for it.
[1:07] You’re listening to the Kindergarten Cafe Podcast, where kindergarten teachers come to learn classroom-tested tips and tricks and teaching ideas they can use in their classroom right away. I’m Zeba, creator and founder of Kindergarten Cafe, and I help kindergarten teachers with everything they need from arrival to dismissal in order to save time, work smarter, not harder, and support students with engaging and purposeful lessons. I’m here to cheer you on through your successes and breakthroughs and offer support and resources so you never have to feel stuck or alone. Ready to start saving time and reducing your stress, all while using effective and purposeful lessons that students love? Let’s get started.
[1:58] So the family is our first community. And a lot of what we want to focus on in kindergarten and social studies is different kinds of communities. And so it’s important that we learn about that first community, but also that we learn about the different types of families that we all have in our classroom to be understanding and respectful.
[2:21] Empathetic, welcoming, and also just opening kids up to the idea that because developmentally, kids are very ecocentric. What they do with their family in their head is what everyone does. And so it’s opening their minds to the fact that people are different and people have different traditions and different types of families and things like that. Before you start any unit on families, it’s important to know the families in your class. You want to know if there’s anything that would be kind of like a trigger to students as you’re teaching about families. Like, is there a child who’s lost a parent is there a child whose parents are divorced and like that might change how you tactfully talk about families or it might mean giving a warning to them before you talk about families so i like to email first i like to just as we’ve established in previous episodes form a good partnership with them with the families in my class getting to know them but also sending an email before i teach about families to say hey we’re about to be learning about families, different kinds of families. If there’s anything that you want me to know about your family so I can better support your child as we learn about different kinds of families, please let me know. So the first thing that I like to do when talking about families is having students share about who’s in their family.
[3:41] And I used to say, so I still have a picture on like my website, is who lives in your house. And I still have that activity, but I also have like who lives in my home because it might not be a physical house, right? Or who lives with me. And I also have a version that has two houses. So again, it’s like getting to know the kids in your room. Who needs the two houses one? Or should you use the who lives with me versus who lives in your house if you have someone who’s maybe homeless, unhoused, or maybe living in a shelter or something?
[4:17] So being mindful of that when you’re doing these activities. But the first thing that I do is we can read a book about families and then we just write about who’s in their family. Now, family can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Some people, and I talk about this with my students, you know, I have three aunts and I have three uncles and I have a grandmother and, you know, but they don’t live with me. You know, I have a dad and a mom, but they don’t live with me anymore. I don’t live with them anymore. And so I talk about like just saying who lives with you, because otherwise you’re going to get a kid that’s drawing every single aunt and uncle and cousin and it gets to be a lot. So trust me on this. Focus on who do they live with. The term would be immediate family, I suppose. But that’s how you can talk about it with kids. We also take this, an extension of this activity is to talk about how many people do you live with, how many people are in your family, and just comparing it just to see, like, what are the different types of families in your classroom and that not all of them look the same, right? Some of them, it’s easy to connect to math, too, because you could do a graph activity here where you’re graphing how many people are in your family, or you can do some counting where you’re drawing how many people and how many pets live with you. And so that can be some nice math connections, as well as literacy connections of drawing and labeling the people in your family, reading family books, lots of ways to connect those other academic areas.
[5:49] I have a whole bunch of family books that I love to read in this unit, and I usually read that, and then we go do one of the activities where they’re writing or drawing or counting the people in their family. The first book that I love to read is Who’s in a Family? Because it just showcases different kinds of families, and it starts off right off the bat, making it known to kids that not all families are the same, and it’s okay for families to look different. Another one like that is Families Are Different. So very clear in the title what that’s about.
[6:20] Another one that I like to read every year is The Family Book by Todd Parr. And again, it showcases different kinds of families or like that families have different traditions, things that they like to do. So I love reading that when we’re talking about things that make our family unique. Another book that i got recently is love makes a family and stella brings the family a good one that connects to math and the counting is a family is a family is a family because it talks more about like numbers of family like number of family members what makes a family isn’t a good one that i got recently and this can kind of launch into other it nicely launches into other social studies conversations and lessons. And so like one book series I got recently is My Religion, Your Religion.
[7:12] And My Food, Your Food. But it’s a great launching off point when you’re talking about families to then talk about, well, some families have different religions, some families eat different food, things like that. You can get all of these books that I recommend in my Amazon shop, so I’ll put that in the link below. But I do think it’s important to pick books that show families that are similar to your students and that are different from your students, like the old, you know, framework of windows and mirrors, right? We want kids to see windows into other cultures and then mirrors into their own lives.
[7:47] We want them to feel validated by seeing their family structure represented in the book. And finally, you know, when we’re talking about families and traditions and celebrations, especially around December when we’re talking about holidays and traditions anyway, naturally.
[8:03] Sending out a project to all the families of letting them draw, use pictures, photos of their favorite family traditions, and then sharing those with the class, that is a freebie. It’s also part of my Holidays Around the World pack, but you can get that freebie in the show notes. But I like seeing what all the families share about in terms of their favorite traditions and cultures, the holidays that they like to celebrate together. But sometimes it’s not just holidays. Sometimes it’s like every summer we go to Great Wolf Lodge. I don’t know. Every New Year’s we get Chinese food. I don’t know. I don’t know what it might be, but it’s not always related to a holiday, I guess was my point.
[8:47] Every summer we go on a boat ride and get ice cream, right? So it doesn’t have to be around a holiday. It’s just something that family likes to do. I also invite families in to talk about those specific holidays and traditions when it’s around the time that the holiday is actually happening. So, for example, if a family celebrates Lunar New Year, I would invite them in. I would I would I said I have a sign up at the beginning of the year at my open house and say you know if there’s a holiday that you celebrate with your family and you want to come in sign up and then I reach out to them who have signed up around the same time as the holiday and we schedule time for them to come in and they prepare something and it’s awesome to hear from them they prepare a little slideshow or they read a book or they plan an activity like they usually don’t need my help they’re usually very really good and so we pick a time for them to come in and the kids love it and it’s a great way to showcase different family traditions and celebrations but so if you haven’t if you haven’t done that you could always or you didn’t get a good sign up you could always take this opportunity when it’s when you’re learning about families.
[9:54] To say hey we’re learning about families and traditions if there’s a holiday that you celebrate we’d love to have you come in let me know what holiday you might want to talk about and then I can let you know we can schedule a time closer to that holiday right so that’s a really good way to involve families in the school and education but learn from families to have them share about their own traditions and cultures and to build off of this unit on families so my goal for this unit in social studies is to introduce to kids the idea like to start with their own, experiences and their own little communities of this is who is in my community this is my family and to then open their eyes to the fact that, all families look the same. Not all families do things the same way. Families might celebrate things differently or have different traditions.
[10:48] There’s things that make each family unique, right? And that the importance of the family, and I get this from the books that I read, is not who it is, right? It’s not that you have to have a checklist of, you have to have a mom and you have to have a dad, but rather that love makes the family, that the key piece of family is that they love each other and support each other. I am recording this based on things I’ve done every year leading up to now. I don’t know what will change with how I teach about families and things based on the Supreme Court judgment this year, this past year, last summer, I should say, about kids opting out from lessons. To me, it’s important because I have kids with families with two moms or two dads. Like, it’s important that kids know that those exist to me. I rather them learn to be sensitive to that fact that, yes, some families have two moms. So that when they hear about a kid that has two moms, they’re not like, what? You can’t have two moms. Like, no, I want them to just, it’s a matter of fact thing that, yes, there are families out there with two moms and there are families out there with two dads. There’s families out there with one mom. There’s families out there with one dad and one grandmom, like, or an uncle.
[12:03] Whatever it is, there’s different kinds of families. And that is the goal of this unit. There’s no preaching involved. There’s no family should be this. I don’t know. So anyway, a little caveat that I know things are getting all crazy with or things could be getting crazy. I know that things could be getting difficult after that Supreme Court hearing. And it is stressing me out. And I don’t know yet as the time of this recording, like what my district is doing about that. Or my state. So a little caveat to this unit, but I don’t think it should be political just to say that there is a kid that has two families, two moms. I mean, like that to me is just a matter of fact. It’s not an opinion. There are families out there with two moms. That’s yes, two moms can marry. Two girls can get married. It’s not an opinion. It is a fact. That is legally the case as of recording. So I’d love to hear from you and hear what you’re thinking about all this. How you recognize and celebrate families and teach about families with your class. So let me know. And like I said, the next episode we do, I’ll be sort of zooming out and talking more about the big picture of social studies in kindergarten.
[13:23] Thanks so much for listening to the Kindergarten Cafe Podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes for more information and resources, or just head straight to KindergartenCafe.org for all the goodies. If you liked this episode, the best ways to show your support are to subscribe, leave a review, or send it to a friend. I’ll be back next week with even more kindergarten tips. See you then.